The American Psychoanalytic Association must provide excitement, welcoming collegiality, and continuing scientific growth for all who have and will be graduated from our component institutes.
As president I will support and further the premier analytic identity of The American and its members and preserve the essential values of psychoanalysis in the changing world of the 90s. Psychoanalysis has entered a phase in which current and exciting theories of the mind based on Freud and input from other disciplines and the neurosciences stimulates rather than perturbates the clear outline of our psychoanalytic world. We must foster diversity of psychoanalytic ideas and theories and encourage ferment in our meetings and publications while maintaining standards in our institutes.
I am particularly interested in contributing to the creation of an environment in which good psychoanalysis and research can flourish. I believe that the struggle over what psychoanalysis is no longer need occupy us and that my creative and pragmatic abilities can harness the best ideas and energies of our committed members. The president's role is to speak for our organization and our discipline and to strengthen cohesion and morale. My ability to engage the members in dialogue will make for responsive leadership while cementing faith and trust in the office and the association.
The challenge of the next decade is to develop active responses to the increasingly competitive climate in which practice and education are set. The IPA and the American Psychological Association are recognizing alternative institutes at the same time that psychoanalytic practitioners with diverse training and expertise proliferate. The American must direct its services to psychoanalysis, its constituent organizations and their members by deepened support of private practice and negotiations with third party payers. We can maintain our separate identity and high standards while penetrating the barriers that separate us from the patients that need us.
I believe we should continue to seek and support a strong presence in departments of psychiatry and cement our longstanding alliances with organized psychiatry. By invigorating our association, publicizing the significance and value of our educational standards, and working together with groups we respect, we can maintain our leadership role in American psychoanalysis.
Within our own organization we must invest in education and stimulate innovations in teaching and certification under the auspices of the Board, which will continue the increasingly sensitive, sophisticated, and valuable site-visit and liaison committee support that heightens educational effectiveness, and facilitates the mutual transfer of information and insights. Emphasis upon and acceptance of the importance of clear minimum standards will leave site visitors freer to participate in broad consultations on educational issues.
Reviews and comparisons of site-visit issues are themselves deserving of discussion and research, paralleling and deepening the research on and refinement of the standards of certification. Perhaps we have arrived at a time to find a way to abstract the information obtained from certification, hitherto kept priviliged, to inform both education committees and site visitors.
The Council, with its unique role in relation to the expanded membership and the societies, can further direct its energies and time to discuss, formulate and support scientific programs, publications, and research. It can enhance the societies' development of postgraduate study groups, publication, and community networks, and thus promote their active and varied scientific life. The innovative programs of resident fellowships, and loans to candidates, particularly academics and researchers, and the encouragement of candidate attendance at meetings can be expanded if outside financing is sought and obtained by the president and treasurer.
As president, I will continue and expand a policy of even-handed appointments to Committees of Council and Joint Committees of Board and Council to minimize schisms, blocs, and factional position-taking. The Council may need to develop its own form of site-visit to strengthen individual society programs and leadership with information, materials, and services not otherwise available or communicated.
To accomplish the goals described, it is vital to ensure that competent graduates of our own institutes can apply for membership upon graduation. I agree with the 60% of the voting certified members who approved the delinkage referendum, and I will seek an appropriate way to implement that consensus.
Delinkage separates membership in the scientific organization from certification in conformity with the original conception of certification. It is the strategically necessary key to engaging both recent graduates and the more than 600 extended associates in the varied and significant programs of our association. Their progressive development as psychoanalysts and the quality of their practice can only be enhanced by full membership. Reciprocally, full membership will assure the vitality of our organization by increasing its human and financial resources. We have an unusual opportunity to expand our membership functionally and provide a forum for those analysts who already represent us in their communities.
For those members who seek national acknowledgment of competence in both theory and practice, the goal will remain certification. In order to maintain standards, certification must be freed of the economic and political pressures that now beset it. Our aim is to give certification more of the independence of organizational issues that standards in other medical specialities enjoy and that was envisioned in 1976 when it was first established. While graduates will be encouraged by plans to scrutinize, study, and improve certification, we cannot wait for their response to possible innovations before gathering them in and involving them actively in postgraduate work on the national level.
Underlying these plans is my concept of an
expanded Central Office to serve as a responsive coordinating and disseminating resource. Through the inquiries it receives, it will identify current administrative, educational, and community-related core problems that until now have been handled primarily in isolation or through personal connections. These problems will be funneled to appropriate officers and committees. The disparity between the needs of large and of small institutes will be recognized and addressed; our system is not homogeneous in manpower or wealth. The Central Office can supplement the current informal exchange of ideas by serving as the clearing house for such tools as computerized library lists and bibliographies, teaching innovations and curriculums, postgraduate study group recognition, and international speaker's schedules.
These changes are part of our response to alterations in the milieu surrounding psychoanalysis; they will be costly. The increased financial resources that would accompany our newly expanded membership should be able to support these proposed increases in services. Delinkage may give us the time and opportunity to review how all members can best share the cost of the organization over their professional lifetimes.
Our profession is a unique one with a proud heritage. It continues to make vital contributions to our culture, to medicine, and to neuroscience, and to play a significant role in the modern therapeutic world as well as in all programs aimed at prevention and early intervention. The energy and resources of our members, enhanced by the wisdom and experience of contributors from the past, are available to anyone who leads this organization. I want to serve as the enthusiastic leader, mediator and healing force of an inclusive organization. Utilizing many structures and individuals now in place will enable The American to focus on promoting interest in the study of psychoanalysis, in high standards for education, certification, postgraduate study, and practice, and in maintaining The American's prominence in the United States.